Recent research shows how paid leave impacts women’s employment and financial security in the United States
During the first several months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government ensured that all U.S. workers had access to at least 2 weeks of paid sick leave and up to 10 extra weeks of paid family and medical leave to take care of themselves or a sick loved one. This income support was meant to help contain the spread of the virus while also maintaining workers’ connections to their jobs and ensuring they were not punished for staying home when they or their family members fell ill.
These federal protections expired at the end of 2020. Though some states do provide paid sick and family leave to their workers in the absence of federal paid family and sick leave, under this patchwork of protections, not all workers can rely on these important income support programs. While paid leave policies continue to be debated in state houses and at the federal level, recent research shows that both paid family and sick leave can have positive impacts on employment, career advancement, and economic security—especially for women, who tend to take on more caregiving responsibilities than men.This column looks more closely at these impacts and what they could mean for future policymaking.
The impact of state-level paid sick leave mandates
In the 2024 general election, voters in three states—Alaska, Missouri, and Nebraska—approved ballot measures requiring employers to provide paid sick leave to employees, adding to the 15 states and the District of Columbia that already mandate employer-provided paid sick leave. At the federal level, the proposed Healthy Families Act, which would create a federal requirement for paid sick leave, has been reintroduced in several sessions of Congress.
Recent research by Meredith Slopen at CUNY Graduate Center’s Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality (and an Equitable Growth grantee) shows that paid sick leave policies can improve women’s employment and financial security. Slopen examines paid sick leave mandates in California, Massachusetts, and Oregon and finds that the policies increase overall employment by 1.2 percentage points, increase wages by an average of $2,347 per year, and decrease poverty over time. These effects of paid sick leave are the largest for women with children and for Black women and Latinas, indicating that this policy may help improve gender, racial, and ethnic equity.
While not focused specifically on women, research that has been conditionally accepted in the Journal of the European Economic Association finds that state-level sick pay policies improve the number of workers covered by paid sick leave. Specifically, the co-authors—Equitable Growth grantees Catherine Maclean of George Mason University, Stefan Pichler of the University of Groningen, and Nicolas R. Ziebarth of Cornell University—find that under state-level mandates, the percentage of jobs providing paid sick time increases from 63 percent prior to the policy enactment to more than 90 percent 5 years after enactment. Their research also shows a crowding-in effect, where employers offer additional benefits, such as life insurance or dental insurance, after the paid sick leave mandate goes into effect.
The impact of paid family and medical leave programs
The United States does not have a national paid family and medical leave program. The Family and Medical Leave Act, enacted in 1993, mandates up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave, though not all workers are covered by the law; those who have worked less than 12 months for their current employer, for example, or those whose workplaces have fewer than 50 employees are excluded. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia have passed paid family and medical leave legislation in the absence of a federal mandate. Yet this patchwork of leave policies has unequal impacts, including, for example, that women in private-sector jobs have lower access to paid leave than men in the private sector.
A recently released report by the Urban Institute, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau, conducted a microsimulation of the proposed FAMILY Act, which would create a federal paid family and medical leave program. It finds that the poverty rate would decrease by more than 16 percent for households receiving paid family and medical leave benefits, with the largest reductions among Black and Latino workers. It also finds that women would be more likely to take leave and to have longer durations for their leave than men—though women’s overall pay from their longer leaves would not be substantially higher than men taking shorter leaves due to men’s higher average wages and more hours worked.
Paid family and medical leave also affects women’s career advancement. An analysis of the Family and Medical Leave Act by sociologists Eunmi Mun of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Shawna Vican of the University of Delaware, and Erin Kelly of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (also an Equitable Growth grantee) finds that the number of women in managerial roles increased in the years following the enactment of the unpaid leave law, compared to the years prior. Interestingly, the largest increases in women’s representation in managerial-level positions occurred at organizations that already had either paid or unpaid maternity leave prior to the law’s passage, while the most significant increases for Black, Latina, and Asian American women occurred at firms that had paid maternity leave before the Family and Medical Leave Act was passed.
The researchers theorize that the unpaid leave law’s impact at a given company depended on the point of departure—that is, the existing policies and organizational culture around maternity leave before the FMLA roll-out. Rather than the new law substituting the existing maternity leave policies at firms that already had them, it instead tended to reinforce and strengthen existing leave policies and company culture, leading to more career advancement for women following the implementation of the law.
This analysis of the unpaid family and medical leave law indicates the potential for increased career advancement for women if a paid family and medical leave policy is passed at the federal level, including for women at companies already offering some paid leave.
working paper
Mandated Sick Pay: Coverage, Utilization, and Welfare Effects
January 12, 2022
working paper
working paper
Conclusion
The research discussed here adds to the existing literature about the impact of paid leave policies, including paid sick days and paid family and medical leave, for women’s employment, career advancement, and overall financial security. The evidence is clear: Federal paid leave policies could help address ongoing gender inequality in career advancement and financial security in the United States.
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